This is about those charming little handbags from the workshop of the talented designer-duo Ivana Dimitrijevic & Prithwish Das. Prithwish & Ivana set up their design workshop together in a small attic atop their Santiniketan residence in 2008, and soon they were producing these finely crafted & strikingly original designer handbags.

Hand-crafted bag by Ivana & Prithwish

Each bag is painstakingly designed, hand-stitched, with the duo personally travelling to & scavenging all parts of Bengal to select & source their material.

Detail of block-printed fabric from one of the bags

Clearly, a fine understanding of the nuances of textile – the language of texture, an intuitive grasp of the flow of patterns – resulted in these rich & layered creations.

Hand-crafted Bag by Ivana & Prithwish

These hand-crafted bags have a charm of their own, with their measured imperfections & ’errors’, & (often, the best part) the designers’ whim in their choices of materials & contours. All these add up to a kind of poetic perfection where each creation offers a set of material solutions which seems just right within its scope.